Excellence in Product

Winner

Kyle McGinn - Workplace by Facebook

Kyle leads product management for Workplace, a collaboration platform made by Facebook. The whole company use the product internally and launched to the public in October 2016. They now have over 30,000 organisations using it globally, from startups (Spotify), to multi-nationals (Walmart). It’s entirely built out of Facebook’s London engineering site and the team work very closely with the global sales team to gain direct market feedback on the product.

The team build features unique to Workplace (like Office365 and GSuite integrations) but also incorporate features from Facebook itself to Workplace. For example, integrating Facebook Live – it only took the team a few weeks to bring the multi-month Facebook initiative, and customise it so it was relevant to Workplace. Live has been a huge success in Workplace, with CEOs connecting to their companies and project teams using it to ensure it was suitable to use in a company environment.

Runners up

Niv Liran - AUTO1 Group

In almost six years, AUTO1 Group has grown to over 3000 employees, generates revenue of over €2 billion and is now Europe’s leading car trading platform. Niv runs a team of 170 engineers, along with 20 product managers and five designers.

AUTO1 Group’s reinvention of the entire used-car buying process for a purely online experience was a large undertaking, and Niv was particularly instrumental to the success of AUTO1’s product that involves buying cars from private sellers and selling them to the professional market.

He works closely with the CTO and has made a raft of important technology decisions that helped them to scale the business quickly and make the founders’ vision a reality.

Ephraim Luft - Farfetch

In his role, Ephraim leads the product management, product design, data science and product analytics functions across Farfetch. He has led the product management of Farfetch’s platform ecosystem, including the Farfetch marketplace, white label business and retail innovation business unit. Ephraim leads a team of 300, which grew from 20 employees in just three years.

The company now has a much deeper understanding of its customers and its relationships with them: the customer engagement score from its app has been double that of any competitor. Ephraim has been instrumental in this and in creating innovative products for the firm’s platform; these use machine learning to bring in a much wider range of suppliers. This has increased customer engagement with the platform. Farfetch also launched the platform in Arabic and has done so far quicker than their competitors.